Here’s what I’ve been enjoying lately on my Switch 2. These are store links, but we get no affiliate or advertising dollars from them, they’re provided just out of convenience.

Cruise Elroy’s great retro-styled action platformer Annalynn (Switch, Steam, itch.io)

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream (Switch), a social sim abounding in quirkiness

UFO 50, for many things but especially for the addictive Party House (homepage, Switch, Steam)

Caves of Qud, the terrific true roguelike, filled with equal parts, with atmosphere almost as great as its challenge, but also two accessible easy modes (homepage, Steam, GoG, itch.io)

Chibi-Robo, the sleeper hit for Gamecube where you help a tiny housekeeping robot save a fractured family and also discover the secret of the house’s living toys (Nintendo Gamecube Classics)

Kirby Air Riders, Masahiro Sakurai’s remake of the Gamecube cult classic, with even deeper gameplay, robust online multiplayer and so much fun that it oozes out of the system’s USB-C ports (Switch 2)

Dragon Quest I+II HD-2D Remake, not just a conversion but a redesign, not always for the better but still great (Square-Enix page, Switch)

Blippo+, Yacht and Panic’s sci-fi tale of interplanetary communication told through the medium of an exacting recreation of 90s satellite television (homepage, Switch, Steam, Playdate; currently on sale for Switch and on Steam)

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Tomodachi Life is a big release from Nintendo, its first real use of their once-starring Mii characters since the quirky and underappreciated Miitopia, which basically puts your little pseudo-people through a D&D campaign, an idea so cool that I had it myself over a decade ago, though of course no one listened to me way back then, or really ever.

Let’s remember what Miis are. The name itself is a reference to the characters’ origin system, the Wii. You see, you just flip the W. The Wii was extremely popular, and opened up video gaming to hitherto unserved demographics, but because most “gamers” are entitled jerks they spread bad vibes about the system despite its popularity (remember “waggle?”), taking its sequel system entirely. Nowadays, Nintendo Switch Sports and Miis are probably its sole remaining legacy, regardless of how many other cool ideas it had. (A version of Opera made for it! News and Weather Channels! In Japan you could order pizza using it! I haven’t even gotten to Check Mii Out and Everybody Votes yet.)

This is the third game in the Tomodachi Life series. The first one was 14 years ago, the original Tomodachi Life for 3DS, got a cult following. It’s kind of Nintendo’s version of The Sims, if the Sims had (very) slightly more self-motivation, no mandatory biological need to fulfil, and an emphasis on weirdness. The second game, the sorely-missed Miitomo, was a free-to-play mobile game that also served as an instant messenger, but it hit sadly at a time when the old style of instant messenger apps were dying out, and lasted just over two years. It was dead in the water long before it closed.

What all the Tomodachi Life games really are is an elaboration of the old game of Mad Libs. “Hey _name_, I’m going to _place_! Should I pick up a _noun_ while I’m there?” Except it’s not just with words, but people too, your Mii characters fill in the role of actors in the many silly little vignettes built into the software. The game includes no characters on its own: you create everyone in the whole damn town, name them, pick how they look, and rate their personalities in five categories, then plop them onto the island and watch them bounce off each other.

Sometimes when they meet you’ll be asked to give the system a word or phrase for them to talk about, and that’s where the more explicit Mad Lib connection kicks in. Just like official Mad Libs*, Maybe nine times out of ten the jokes will fall flat, but that tenth time is comedy gold. Of course what everyone did, and still does, is make Miis of every celebrity and comic character they can fit into Nintendo’s limited yet oddly useful tools. In my game, I have a Mr. T character, downloaded from the Mii Channel on the Wii so very long ago, laboriously schlepped over to Wii-U (via system import) to Switch (via Amiibos) to Switch 2 (via another system import). Mr. T had a dream his first night in my game, on the isle of Yendor, in which he met three other Miis all with Mr. T’s face.

I’d love to show you the video of his dream, but I forgot to record it. Also, though, Tomodachi Life: Live the Dream has a fatal flaw. It’s a meme gold mine, sure, but Nintendo has disabled all media sharing from it. You can make all the great Miis you want, but no one else will ever see them! Its drawing tools are pretty darn impressive, but nothing you make with them can be shared on the internet! You can’t upload them to the Nintendo Switch smartphone app, or even transfer them to your cell phone using Nintendo’s stupid Wi-Fi system! I don’t know if you can get them right off an SD card, but ha ha, on the Switch 2 it doesn’t matter because it uses incompatible SD Express cards!

NINTENDO, ARE YOU LISTENING? WHY CAN YOU EVEN TAKE SCREENSHOTS OR VIDEO AT ALL IN TOMODACHI LIFE IF YOU CAN’T SHARE THEM? Nintendo is a company used to doing things its own way, which sometimes results in moments of brilliance, but at least as often means they do amazingly stupid things like this.

Because of this, you will have to live with potato-quality screen photos, taken with my very own smartpotato. I plant them below. Imagine how much better these would be if Nintendo actually officially supported the use their software was obviously made for. (Note: I’ve been told since writing this that you can still get images off using an SD card… although if you have a Switch 2 like I do you’re probably just as out of luck as it uses SD Express cards. I’ve yet to confirm cross compatibility with those, I don’t think I have the right kind of adapter.)

Below is my absolute favorite of all the Mii interactions I’ve seen so far. Poor Patricia’s got it bad, and truthfully, I felt much the same way back in 2008. I kind of feel that way now, but sadly both his terms are up.

* BTW, did you know Mad Libs was co-created by Leonard Stern, who wrote many scripts for The Honeymooners, and wrote for and executive produced Get Smart?

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The process is to boot the Gamecube and Gameboy Player with the GBA plugged into it with the cable. Then turn off the Gamecube leaving the Gameboy Advance on, disconnect the GBA cable from the GC, then plug it into the Gamecube adapter plugged into a USB port connected to the Switch. If the GBA is still powered on, it should be usable as a Switch controller at that point, until it’s turned off!

If you don’t have them all that kit, a modded GC or Wii will also suffice for the Gameboy Player. It’s all demonstrated in NotRealEric’s video. There is also some alternate hardware usable, including third-party adapters and connectors. The video is ten minutes long, but the setup is in the first 3½ minutes of it; the rest is demonstrating some use cases, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The hardest to find of these devices now, if you don’t use modded hardware, is the Gameboy Player, which is quite expensive used. But if you do happen to have all the pieces, it’s quite the hack. It seems to work due to a controller-emulation program the Gameboy Player (or modded GB or Wii running mGBA) sends to the GBA, which, amazingly, is Switch compatible.

Maybe you have a magic combination of gizmos lying around to use this trick, and use a GBA as an extremely limited Switch peripheral? Yeah, let’s not kid ourselves, this is pretty silly and doesn’t have a strong use case, considering that Switches come with two Joycons, but it’s amazing that it works at all.

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First thing. I’ve mentioned this on social media, and I want to spread the word as much as I can about it, because this is going to catch people by surprise, and this way as many will find out about it going in as possible. In addition to costing $450 at launch, $500 with bundled Mario Kart World, and possibly more if Trump’s moronic tariffs stick, as stated in the direct, the Switch 2 uses a special incompatible variant of Micro SD cards, called Micro SD Express.

They’ve been out for a while, but uptake has been slow, mainly because their chief benefit is transfer speed, and Micro SD is fast enough for most purposes. But since its use in the Switch’s has been a performance bottleneck, Nintendo went with SD Express, which has the advantage of being faster, but the disadvantages of being both way less ubiquitous, easy to confuse with normal Micro SD cards, and of course, being more expensive. Ars Technica did a rundown, revealing that Micro SD Express cards are actually more expensive than SSDs at an equivalent price-per-gigabyte. It’s not a proprietary format, but consider that it’s possible that the only SD Express cards you’ll be able to find in a store that you buy your Switch from will be Nintendo-branded, and more expensive, it feels like it effectively is proprietary for now.

How to tell a standard Micro SD card from a Micro SD Express card? Express cards have an EX logo on their label, and they also have more contacts, as shown by this illustration from an SD Association whitepaper:

It’s true the Switch 2 has much more internal storage than the Switch. But many users will also be bringing their Switch digital libraries with them, meaning it’s possible for that storage to be full on day one. I have a 256 SD in my Switch, and I already have to make hard decisions about what I have installed and what I leave in “the cloud.” That will be my reality as soon as I transfer my eShop purchases to the Switch 2.

I mused a bit on Nintendo’s stating that the Switch 2 will be mostly backwards compatible with the Switch 1, meaning, not everything on the original Switch will work with it. What gives?

Nintendo has a page listing games that aren’t Switch 2 compatible. At first glance, it seems that all the issues are with games that are physically incompatible. Like, the Labo VR Kit isn’t compatible, because the Switch 2 is larger than the Switch 1, and it can’t actually fit into the cardboard goggles. Several other Labo kits are similarly “incompatible.” WarioWare Move It is mostly compatible, but the Switch 2 JoyCons don’t have the infrared camera the right JoyCon on the Switch 1 has. You can still pair Switch 1 JoyCons with a Switch 2 though, so if you have them laying around you can still play IR-requiring games. This also affects Game Builder Garage and some Labo titles.

Ring Fit Adventure and Nintendo Switch Sports use accessories that you insert a Switch 1 JoyCon into, and Switch 2 JoyCons won’t fit into them. And 1-2-Switch has a unique issue: the Switch 2 has more subtle rumble, and it seems a 1-2-Switch minigame uses that rumble to communicate information to players, which could end up being an issue.

But… that isn’t the whole story. It turns out there’s a good list of Switch games that have issues on the Switch 2, software issues, but you have to click through to a couple of PDFs to find out about those. Here’s a list of games with “start up issues,” meaning probably they won’t load. And here’s games with issues once they’re running. These lists may shrink over time as bugs are found and stamped out, but that might take a good while; it took years for the Wii-U to run the WiiWare game LostWinds.

Some notable games on the not-starting list: a selection of NeoGeo and Arcade Archives titles, Another Crab’s Treasure, Fornite (although I suspect there will be a Switch 2 native version), Nintendo’s own Fitness Boxing, Doom Eternal, Pizza Tower(!) and River City Girls Zero. Some of the games that play, but with issues: two Tetris The Grand Master games from Arcade Archives, Factorio, Fall Guys, Mega Man Legacy Collection and Stumble Guys.

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Seems unfair to me, but I suppose they thought everyone has a smartphone these days. (Until recently, I didn’t!) And I understand the web browser was a persistent security hole for the Wii-U. So while they include a web browser in the Switch for those reasons, it’s locked-off from the users. It’s still a security risk, mind you.

Now, a weird thing about the Switch is it’s multitasking system. The OS reserves a large portion of its memory for an “applet.” This is one of a number of system programs intended to provide a number of services to the user and running game software. Each of the round button options on the Home menu starts up an applet. The eShop is an applet. The system keyboard is an applet. And the web browser is an applet.

One thing about the applets is only one can run at a time! Games can actually run in the background while the Home menu and an applet are open, but if a game calls upon the system keyboard to enter text, then you go to the Home menu and open something else, the keyboard will stop. When you return to the game, it’ll have to be restarted.

It’s all explained in James-Money’s 13 minute video, Understanding the Nintendo Switch Browser:

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There are also games that used to support them but no longer do. The version of Super Mario Galaxy on Super Mario 3D All-Stars doesn’t let you select a system Mii to use as the file icon. You’re limited to one of the Mario characters provided! It’s a shame that. But, Nintendo Switch Sports, Smash Ultimate, and of course Miitopia supports them, as do four other games on the platform.

I’ve actually been through the process explained in the below video, by CJCat, which involves using Amiibo to transfer Miis over one by one from a Wii-U that had a Mii collection brought over using the Wii import channel. We played a lot of Wii, and it’s nice to know all the goofy characters we made, and the memories they carry, are on the Switch, even if few games use them any more. I hope the Switch 2 doesn’t forget about them, and that it makes them easier to bring over!

Bringing a Mii from Wii to Switch (Youtube, 9 minutes)

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

(I decided to get some use out of the old news roundup post template for this item.)

News comes from Ars Technica‘s Kevin Purdy, and was announced on Sega’s website, a large number of items will be removed from Steam and all the major console storefronts with the end of the year, although as Ars points out, the Playstation and Switch storefronts are only seeing the Sega Classics Collection removed. Steam is seeing the most removals. Items on the Nintendo Switch online compilation will not be affected. Nothing removed will disappear from your library of online purchases (unlike what happened with Oxenfree on itch.io when it was picked up by Netflix), so if you want to play these items, in this form, later, buy them now, and you’ll “always” be able to download them again later. (Always deserves scare quotes because nothing online is forever, but you’ll be able to play them some while later at least.)

Why are they being removed? Purdy speculates that, like how Sonic the Hedgehog titles were removed in advance of the release of Sonic Origins, there’s probably some new collection of Sega classics in the works that these items will be a part of, or maybe they plan on bundling a bunch of them with a Yakuza game or something.

Sega’s website lists them all, but the great majority of them are Genesis titles, along with Nights Into Dreams for Saturn, and Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and the Dreamcast Collection, originally for Dreamcast of course. I personally recommend Crazy Taxi, of course.

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I’m new at this kind of editing, and I spent a lot of effort trying to give viewers enough time to read all the text, but I failed somewhat in that regard. I suggest pausing the video if you need to catch up. It’s about the recently released Switch version of Pocket Card Jockey, a horse racing and breeding simulation that search-and-replaced all the fiddly HORSE RIDING parts with CARD GAME: a form of Solitaire called Golf, a.k.a. One Foundation.

Yeah, I’m new at this kind of editing. It was good practice though!

Game Freak has mostly had its legacy taken up by The House that Pikachu built, Pokèmon. Pokè this and Pokè that. But they had a history before they made their absurdly popular critter catching/fighting RPG, beginning as an obscure  Japanese fanzine from 1983, and they sometimes publish a game that has nothing to do with their monstrous progeny. The best known of these is probably the Gameboy Advance game Drill Dozer, but lately they’ve sallied forth into mobile gaming with a title called, in English, Pocket Card Jockey. It got a 3DS port beloved of the few that tried it, and now an update of that is on the Switch ($15). It seems a bit easier now, but it’s still wonderful.

I’ve seen Pocket Card Jockey described as not complicated, and rarely do I see a take that I disagree with more. Pocket Card Jockey is very complicated, each horse has almost a dozen characteristics to be cognizant of, each race is full of tension, and success in G-I (the hardest type) of races usually comes through executing a good strategy. I’ve also seen people say that it must have been easy to make, and I disagree with that assumption too: I think it must have been terribly difficult to construct, and most of that difficulty was in design and playtesting. Games like this don’t just happen, not if they’re any good, and Pocket Card Jockey is good.

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On has an extensive tutorial, with three whole practice races, but there’s still a lot to learn. That’s why I made this video, to try to infect you with some of my own 100-level enthusiasm for it. I know of few games that work better in practice. You should give it a try.

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Here is the list, with personal hype level expressed in stars, none to five:

00:30 – Grounded. Your characters are “shruken at the hands of an evil corporation.” First, corporations don’t have hands, their employees do. Second, it’s interesting to see how corporations have joined mad scientists, sorcerers and alien emperors as “the evil.” Anyway, this looks mostly like Generic Action-Adventure Game. “Work your way through the campaign to uncover the mysteries of the back yard.” Like, where they buried the water pipe? Good luck with that. Two stars.

01:37 – ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the mist. Big contrast to the previous trailer. It’s a “return to the Ender Lily’s world,” just assuming you know what that is. From the trailer I assume the “Ender Lily” must be a really bad flower, because everything is dark and grim, but especially dark. “This once flourishing country sits atop a wealth of buried magic,” yet somehow it looks like Blade Runner. Points for using the word homunculi (16 points if you have the tiles for it) and not inventing another bullshit video game word like “the Aeinsward,” or “the Valarath” or some crap like that. Your character is told early on that “your eyes says[sic] that you long for death.” Sometimes the winning move is not to play. I feel bad about talking down the work of so many hard-working developers, but I don’t think it’s possible to make a game less appealing to me, personally. One star.

03:04 – Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure. “Role-puzzling” is not a thing. Looks like it might be okay, but I’m rating my enthusiasm as generated by the trailers, and they give me flashbacks to the PULL word in Baba Is You, so: Two stars.

03:45 – Unicorn Overlord. Oh, I want to play the fantasy title game too! Gargoyle Emperor! Chimera General! Minotaur President! Looks to me like a Vanillaware joint. Checking: I was right. Reading the transcript, I’m struck by the word unleash, one of those overused videogame words. It literally means to let go, but because it sounds good it gets used for all kinds of things. But really, if it ain’t a dog, it doesn’t fit. Vanillaware’s cool though, so I’ve talked myself into looking forward to it. Three stars.

04:23 – Monster Hunter Stories. “Monster Hunter” brings to mind fighting dragons and behemoths. “Stories” suggests Scenes From A Marriage. Combined, I’m imaging getting hitched to Smaug. (This is probably the backstory to the classic anime Dragon Half, come to think of it.) Anyway, it’s Monster Hunter. You hunt monsters. It’s a remake of a 3DS game, discarding the (mostly) realistic look of other Monster Hunter games for cartoony human characters. I have a previous Monster Hunter on my shelf but I’ve never played it, so I can only rate this One star.

05:00 – Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. I remember when Epic Mickey games filled the discount bins at Walmart, but I always liked the idea, and the internet-viral concept art that inspired them, and they were “directed” by Warren Spector. One thing that always confused me about Epic Mickey, of which the trailer reminds me, is the opening positions Mickey as an innocent interloper, but the content of the Epic Mickey games clearly indicate that these worlds are about him, as a character. He’s not a plucky underdog, he’s the center of the Disney-pocalypse. And yet, that’s interesting. Three stars.

06:07 – Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. The title logo makes it look like it’s called Shin Megami Tensei V: Engeance. This being a remake, I’m just glad they didn’t call it something like Revengance, hah wouldn’t that be stupid. I don’t remember at this point whether a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game has ever appeared in English before. Maybe on the Playstation or Playstation 2? Sounds about right. (Checking: it was recent! 2021! Huh.) I think it defies belief that this isn’t yet another Persona game. Two stars.

07:41 – STAR WARS: Battlefront Classic Collection. Okay I was wrong, it’s not possible for me to be less interested in this. It’s exciting to some people or else they wouldn’t have made this, but I’m writing this, and I say, One star.

08:24 – SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! When your franchise stars a character who was once grounded by his mother for “trying to exterminate the Jews,” I submit that there is something deeply wrong with it. No stars.

There’s so many games here that I’m going to skip around a bit from here on.

10:23 – Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. It’s an article of faith now that there have been no good Monkey Ball games since Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, and the recent Banana Mania, which was primarily content recycled from the old games. I just picked up Banana Mania a couple of days ago and was reminded why I like the Gamecube-era titles so much, so what the hell, Three stars.

11:40 – World of Goo 2. World of Goo was beloved of many people, myself included, and I’ve also liked everything Tomorrow Corporation has done, so I’m really looking forward to this, even if World of Goo is a very hard act to follow. Five stars.

14:03 – Another Crab’s Treasure.That’s a great title. The trailer, itself, actually calls this game a soulslike, which I guess is just the word we use now when a game is meant to be hard. The game does fix my main issue with Souls games, their relentless dourness. It’s whimsical and charming! Three stars.

15:32 – Penny’s Big Breakaway. From some of the people who made Sonic Mania, which itself makes it worthy of examination. A 3D platformer in 2024 that isn’t Mario, who’d have thought it possible. Three stars.

16:13 – Suika Game Multi-Player Mode Expansion Pack. I’ve been a bit outspoken that I don’t really like this version of the concept, prefering Cosmic Collapse on itch.io. Paid DLC that lets you play against others does nothing to improve the concept for me. One star.

16:57 – Pepper Grinder. It looks a bit interesting, but it feels a bit like a cheat that the tunnels you dig close up behind you. Two stars.

17:26 – Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! Originally a F2P mobile game by Game Freak as one of their occasional non-Pokemon titles, like Drill Dozer and Part-Time UFO, which always seem to be terrific. They released a 3DS port that was one of those games that critics (including myself) couldn’t stop gushing over. I’m so hyped for this that I’ve already bought it, as of this writing it’s on my Switch back at home waiting for me to get back and play it. Five stars.

18:16 – Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. A Moomintroll game! One where you play as his enigmatic, vaguely Link-like friend Snufkin! I’m in! Sadly its trailer is really brief. Four stars.

19:26 – Rare Games Added to Nintendo Switch Online. Five games are added: RC Pro-Am (NES), a classic; Snake Rattle & Roll (NES), challenging and a bit underrated; Killer Instinct (N64), which I never cared for but some people will like; Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (SNES), likewise; and Blast Corps (N64), which is very underrated, a launch game that helped define its system. All of these games except Battletoads in Battlemaniacs were previously collected in Rare Replay for Xbox One, but there is a feeling of coming home here. Overall: Four stars.

These releases are notable all because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s decision not to buy Rare from the Stamper brothers at the dawning of the Gamecube era, which lost Nintendo Rare’s then-formidable reputation and coding prowess. Nintendo sold its 49% stake to Rare, and Microsoft bought controlling interest. The Gamecube took a substantial hit to its library, and Rare has never been the same. Despite a few distinctive hits (Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Viva Pinata and Sea of Thieves) I think Microsoft has never really used them well. For a time they were basically devoted to making Kinect games! (Checking: in fact, Rare’s Kinect Sports was at that time their best-selling game since Microsoft acquired them! Shame that its being tied to an abandoned peripheral means it has had practically no lasting legacy.) I would suppose the return of these titles to a Nintendo system is part of the deal that enabled Goldeneye 007 to come to both Xbox and Switch, but that is only speculation.

RC Pro-Am and Snake Rattle & Roll, are extra notable for their copyright notice by Rare Coin-It, a Miami-based subsidiary of Rare, that seemed to be devoted to games that had arcade pretensions. I don’t know that, but a lot of their games released with that copyright have strange arcade affectations: attract modes, high score lists, and arcade structure. In particular: Slalom (which did get an arcade release, as Vs. Slalom for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade platform), Wizards & Warriors, RC Pro-Am and Cobra Triangle. But these weren’t the only games that bore the Rare Coin-It copyright. I really don’t know why; maybe they were assign games that Rare thought might have potential as arcade games.

Back to the Switch Online collection, this move gives me hope that the Wizards & Warriors games, especially the first, and its sequel Ironsword, will make it there someday.

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We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

A fair amount has been said about Suika Game, an inexpensive and addictive Switch game that has players dropping fruit into a physics-enabled bin. Two fruit of the same type that touch immediately merge into a larger fruit, and the goal is to join them together like this until you create a mighty Watermelon. You can keep going at that point, although with one of those majestic spheres in the bin it won’t be much longer before one or more fruits extends up out of the bin, which brings the game to an end.

The history of this unexpected Flappy Bird-like phenomenon is laid out in an article in the Japan Times. Until recently the game was exclusive to the Japanese eShop, although that needn’t actually a barrier. People from any territory can create eShop accounts for any other, and play all their purchases on the same Switch, but now I notice that Suika Game is even on the U.S. shop. And of course, as often happens when a simple and elegant game blows up out of nowhere, a horde of imitators has arisen, which a quick Googling will reveal. I count six free web versions just on a quick perusal of the search results.

But what might actually be better than Suika Game is the Pico-8 recreation of it, Cosmic Collapse.

Cosmic Collapse is more expensive than Suika Game, but that just means it’s $5 instead of $3. Instead of happy fruit, you merge together planets. They go up in size from Pluto (an honorary planet), through Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and then Sol herself. If you’re wondering, all planets are presented without rings. If joining two suns causes anything to happen I don’t know. (In the comments on the itch.io project, the developer says that there are objects beyond the Sun.)

Cosmic Collapse could be played just like the original, but it adds some extra features. Scoring is modified by a simple combo system: successive planets merged due to one drop have their points multiplied, encouraging the planning of sequences. And, at certain score awards, you’re granted a missile that can be used to destroy any one object in the bin. Used judiciously, it can allow your game lengths, and scores, to greatly increase. My highest so far is nearly 15,000.

The biggest advantages it has over Suika Game is in the polish and the physics. The many web clones tend to play like they were hacked together in an afternoon, but even the original is clearly a low-effort production, right down to its generic, non-looping music. The celestial orbs in Cosmic Collapse bounce around in a lively manner after merging in ways that take some practice to master, and even the smaller planets have their uses. The tiniest of space rocks, dropped at the right spot, can be just what you need to knock two other planets apart from each other, or separate one from the wall of the bin. You see? Pluto’s good for something after all!

Both Suika Game and Cosmic Collapse suffer from a certain unfairness. You don’t get to control the order in which fruit or planets get dropped into the bin. It’s been observed that even a lot of skill and practice can only get you so far if the orb-selection dice don’t roll favorably for you. The best advice I can offer, in the early game, is to try to sort the circles in size from one side of the bin to the other, which at least will make it easier to find a good place to drop things. Also in Cosmic Collapse, keeping the surface of the bin as low as you can helps a lot, since the propulsive force of the spheres, especially the smallest ones, is increased the further it falls, and that can be a marvelous prod to shaking up a static bin.

Cosmic Collapse (itch.io and Steam, $5)

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One of the less-remembered things about Pikmin 2 was that it had actual product placement in it. Many of the treasures you found were outright commercial objects, modeled and textured in the game, some with vaguely promotional names, like “Courage Reactor” for Duracell Battery, or “Quenching Emblem” for a 7-Up bottle cap. Even the European and Japanese versions had these, although they reflected products from their territories instead.

Presumably because the licensing deals for these objects have expired, the Switch 2 version of Pikmin 2 uses different, more generic items in place of the trademarked originals. The replacements are an interesting lot. Where they could have just removed the old textures and replaced them with solid colors, they put in fake ingredients lists (too small to read), “Established 1920” notices, fake slogans and logos, notices of product quantity in Imperial units with metric equivalent, and more. You’d almost believe Olimar was finding real goods from Earth, ones that you just haven’t heard of. The tip-off is, the names of the replacement products are just slightly too generic. “Coconut Water” and “Night Lip Balm” are descriptive but generic, and so but really able to be trademarked. They’re a nice batch of fake brands though. For “Pineapple Fresh Slices,” they even made up a realistic-looking US-style Nutrition Facts label!

The differences have been recorded in a video by ModenXP on Youtube, embedded below:

And now, as an exercise in overkill, here’s a list of all the old and new versions, and interesting things about the replacements:

27 Treausres that Changed in Pikmin 2 on Switch (Youtube, 14 minutes)

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It was such a distinctive feature that some people were a bit upset that it wasn’t included in the recent remastered version for the Switch, especially since it was included in the remake of Metroid Prime, in the Metroid Prime Collection released for the Wii. What happened?

Youtube channel KIWI TALKZ spoke with Jack Mathews, one of the programmers of the original version, in a Youtube video, where they revealed that the beam lighting effect was designed around a specific feature of the Gamecube hardware, that made it nearly free. They theorize that it could have been included in the Switch’s version, but it would have been much more costly there, especially at its 60 fps target. The Switch was designed, either cleverly or infamously depending on your point of view, around a mobile graphics chip, that was never intended to wow with effects, even those available to 22-year-old hardware.

It is interesting though, to think there are things the Gamecube’s now-ancient 3D chips can do easily that the Switch has trouble with. Mind you, the Switch does target a much higher resolution than the Gamecube, not 1080p but still 900, which is a lot more than the Gamecube which was aimed at standard def televisions. But on the other armored hand, it has been over two decades. Ah well.

Why Beam Lighting Was Removed In Metroid Prime Remastered (KIWI TALKZ on Youtube, 6 minutes)

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Pac-Man 99 is part of a trilogy of games with similar concepts on the Switch. Of its siblings, Tetris 99 continues to be playable and its online DLC still available, and Super Mario Bros. 35, Nintendo’s free SMB-based version of the concept, shut down years ago now.

All these games are great, and SMB35’s loss is still keenly felt. I particularly rue it because I was freakishly good at it; I have a screenshot somewhere of the records screen showing a streak of 11 1st place wins.

Pac-Man 99 is really good, and its online mode is free to people with a Switch Online subscription, so please enjoy it while you can.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

My cell walls are feeling kind of rigid at the moment due to a computer issue that caused me to lose the first draft of this post. All of my witty remarks, lost to the electronic void. You missed out on my entertaining usage of the phrase “odoriferous blorpy.” Truly we are in the worst timeline. It’s all left me feeling kind of cranky, let’s get through it quickly this week.

Ted Litchfield at PC Gamer on a RuneScape player playing a minigame for eight years and turn turning in all his progress at once. RuneScape is an early MMORPG that began in 2001.

Several things to do with Konami, a once-great publisher that’s become pretty hidebound lately:

Dustin Bailey at GamesRadar: fans are working on a PC remake of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. I’m sure this won’t get obliterated by legal threats. They should have gone with the cheeky route taken by The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest. The article mentions that its creators consider the fact that many townsfolk lie to you to be a problem, instead of awesome as it really is.

Charles Harte at Gamespot organ Game Informer says Dead Cells’ upcoming Castlevania-themed DLC is really big.

Also from Charles Harte, Konami is shutting down their recently-released game CRIMESIGHT, not just removing it from the Steam store but even making it unplayable. Great way to reward people giving you money, K. It’s not even a year old yet!:

Tyler Wilde, also from PC Gamer, on a $2,000 game on Steam and what it’s about. Summarized: it costs $2,000 but is short enough that people can finish it within the return period, and it amounts to a screed against women. Blech!

Dean Howell at Neowin: a fan-made decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past can now be compiled for Windows and (presumably if your device is jailbroken) Switch.

Christ Moyse at Destructoid tells us that Taito’s classic The New Zealand Story is coming to the Arcade Archives series. Gandalf could not be reached at press time for comment.

Two listicles:

Zoey Handley at Destructoid on the 10 best NES soundtracks. The list is Bucky O’Hare, Kirby’s Adventure, Castlevania 3 (Japanese version), Contra, Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros. 2, Mega Man 2, Castlevania II, Journey to Silius, and… Silver Surfer?

Gavin Lane and the NintendoLife staff on the 50 best SNES games. The list is compiled algorithmically from reader scores, and can change even after publication. At this time, the top ten are, starting from $10: Donkey Kong Country 2, Earthbound, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV, Super Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island, Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Mario World on top.

Tom Phillips at EuroGamer mentions that the original developers of Goldeneye 007, recently rereleased after 25 years on Switch and Xbox platforms, were a bit miffed that they weren’t asked to participate in the festivities. At the time most of its developers were completely new to the game industry, and they’ve been generally snubbed by its publishers in talking about the new versions. Does feel pretty shabby, Nintendo and Microsoft!

Andrew Liezewski at Gizmodo talks about the graphics in an upcoming Mario 64 hack made by Kaze Emanuar. I’ve followed Kaze’s hacking videos quite a bit (I think one’s been posted on Set Side B before), and the optimizations they’ve made to Mario 64’s engine are amazing, not only eliminating lag but great increasing its frame rate and making it look better to boot.

And, at Kotaku, Isaiah Colbert reports on various things being done to celebrate Final Fantasy VII’s 26th birthday, including official recognition in Japan of “Final Fantasy VII day” and a crossover with Power Wash Simulator. Maybe they can do something about cleaning out all the grunge from Midgar, that city could use a bath.

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Well this post is just to inform you that Wobbledogs is now on the Nintendo Switch! No one paid us for this notice-I’m just an enthusiast. That’s everything on this site-enthusiastic.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

I’m back! I’ve been bobbing and blobbing around internet slimepools and have dredged from their murky depths the latest gaming information for your consumption! Yum!

Engadget’s Kris Holt tells us that the graphic-based Steam version of Dwarf Fortress is on the way! It’ll cost $30, which it is possible to be dismayed by, except that if there’s any game that offers depth and content worth at least $30, it’s Dwarf Fortress. The version will have not only graphics but a tutorial and updated UI! And the free version will continue to be updated! Dwarf Fortress is going with a paid version because its creators, being not electronic dwarves but actual human being people, need money to live. Please, help them to live!

Liam Doolan at Nintendo Life: Mario Party 1 and 2 are coming to Switch Online’s Expansion Pack. I wonder if the games will destroy Joycons as thoroughly as it did N64 joysticks?

K. Thor Jensen for PC Magazine writes about what he considers the 10 worst arcade conversions of all. They cover a number of likely suspects. Atari 2600 Pac-Man, NES 720°, GBA Mortal Kombat, GBA Marble Madness, PC Thunder Blade, Amiga Street Fighter II, NES Ikari Warriors, 2600 Double Dragon, PS1 X-Men vs Street Fighter, and C64 Cisco Heat. But, I dunno, there are a lot of awful computer ports of arcade games floating around out there. Given the time I could probably redo the whole list, but PC Magazine isn’t paying me to do it. Plus, that kind of negativity is more the Gripe Monster’s lawn.

Ryan Dinsdale at IGN tells us that Microsoft loses from $100 to $200 on every Xbox X and S they sell. Aaahahaha! Yes my minions, exult with me in the misfortune of a major console manufacturer, for no good reason than sheer ill will! Er. Sorry, I let the evil out of my brain for a moment there.

At Kotaku, John Walker says that Playstation Plus has lost two million subscribers after its relaunch! Haahaha! Revel in their misfortune! Giant corporations will destroy the earth, at least they suffer very slightly every once in a great while! Oops, sorry again, I really need to get my bile gland emptied more often. The article mentions that the higher-priced tiers mean Sony is actually making more money now anyway.

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Live A Live is currently the toast of the Switch, with over 500,000 in sales since it was released. Not bad at all for a remake of a Super Famicom game from Square’s classic era that had never made it out of Japan until now.

AustinSV on Youtube presents a video that goes into some detail about what was changed between the versions. If you’ve played the original (I’ve played a fair bit of it through the popular fan translation from Aeon Genesis), you’ll know a few things were definitely tweaked. I remember the Prehistory, by far the funniest chapter, being rather more risque in its humor, although the fart jokes and poop flinging were left mostly intact. Some of the changes are really interesting; they translated the whole Middle Ages chapter in iambic pentameter!

Which Version of Live A Live Should You Play? The Original + Switch Remake Reviewed & Compared (Youtube, 16 minutes)

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s been a bit difficult getting consistent signals from Earth lately, and what has gotten through hasn’t been of too much interest to my gelatinous brain. Maybe some of this might pique your interest?

Jonathan Bolding at PC Gamer says that playing dual-screen with a Steam Deck proves the Wii-U was a good idea! I knew it! What they’re talking about is the ability of a Steam Deck to play dual-headed via HDMI out. This play style is explicitly supported in Wii-U emulator Cemu. The article also notes that Valve has stated that the Steam Deck has out-performed sales estimates, which is good! After the Steam Link and Steam Controller were put on sale for ultra-cheap, I was feeling bad about scooping them up as Valve was clearing out stock. Not too bad, though.

Here’s some news from a different source than usual. At romhacking.net, creator Michael Nix has been working on a pair of GUI rom editors for Super Mario Bros. 3! One, SMB3-Foundry, is for editing levels, and the other, SMB3-Scribe, edits overworlds. A game like SMB3 is a bewilderingly complex beast under the hood, and the strictures of platform, rom space and development time sometimes force unorthodox decisions, like hardcoding some object placements. There is an article to be written some time about the lengths NES carts had to go through to encode their data, which was usually done using a kind of domain-specific data compression.

I have been avoiding linking CBR.com for a bit because of some excessively clickbait headlines, but a recent device change has reset my killfile, so they’re back. Shane Foley from there reports on series nadir Metroid Other M having one level that made it worthwhile. The “level” in question is in fact the entire postgame; up until the main boss, the whole game is heavily on rails, with full exploration only possible afterward.

At Polygon, Nicole Carpenter mentions the content warnings on new indie title I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, which has a number of traumatic events in the game, but is quite upfront about what will occur, going so far as asking the player if they’d like to be spoiled regarding which characters die, or may die. It is a heartening development.

Keith Stuart at the Guardian has a retrospective on gaming on the Commodore 64 at age 40. That old huh. Naw, that doesn’t immediately paralyze me with fear.

(Note: the Guardian is in one of those phases where they nag you with a huge yellow subscription ad. It can be easily closed, and not nearly as bad as some sites out there, but it happens. One article I checked this time-I will not link them-had autoplaying overlaid videos in the corner, which resulted in them being ejected from this post. Bad web designer, no biscuit!)

Shaun Musgrave at Touch Arcade lists the best recent iPhone game updates. Mentioned are Baba Is You (yay!), Genshin Impact, and Mini Metro (yay again!).

Destructoid’s Chris Carter lists Switch games that make substantive use of the right Joycon’s IR sensor.

Blogfriend Kyle Orland at Ars Technica reports on Fabrice Breton, creator of indie game Brok the Investigator, and their efforts to track down Steam key scammers, curators who would ask devs for free Steam keys but then sell them. As usual from Kyle it’s great and informative reading!

From Alice Newcome-Beill at The Verge, a report on a new version of a Switch Pro controller from 8BitDo, who seem to make good products, although they note they have not yet received the controller for testing.

And for our weekly eyeroll exercises, it’s been reported everywhere but GamesRadar hasn’t been seen in these pages yet so let’s give the link to them: Benjamin Abbott relates that Disney is releasing a Magic: The Gathering style trading card game going by the name of (roll your eyes now!) Lorcana. I’m already brainstorming jokes to make about it as they leak its features over the coming weeks!

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In the style of huge corporations in the year 2022, Nintendo has announced a slate of upcoming indie games in the form of a video instead of a sensible text page. It fell to The Escapist to give us a nice text-form rundown of their impending offerings.

In the spirit of reducing things even further, the games on tap, with each game’s segment cued up for easy perusal, are:

• Ooblets, from Glumberland, aggressively cute farming/monster sim.
• Batora: Lost Haven, from Team17 and Stormind Games, sci-fi narrative action-RPG.
• ElecHead, from Nama Takahashi, pixel-art puzzle/platformer that he started working on as a student, and started life as a game jam project.
• Soundfall, from Drastic Games and Noodlecake, co-op rhythm action combat game. (Released today!)
• Wildfrost, from Chucklefish and Deadpan Games, a “tactical roguelike deckbuilder.” (We have our own opinions as to what roguelike means.)
• Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, from Landfall Games, a humorous physics-based combat simulation sandbox that first made waves on Steam.
• Gunbrella, from doinksoft and Devolver Digital, a Wild West-themed “noir-pink” pixel-art Metroidvania. Not available until next year, though.
• We Are OFK, from Team OFK, a episodic “indiepop music biopic” game (a lot of scare quotes this post, I admit) based on a band.
• Silt, from Fireshine and Spiral Circus Games, an aquatic puzzle/exploration game with a monochrome silhouette aesthetic.
• Mini Motorways, from Dinosaur Polo Club! A sequel to Mini Metro, I did a Q&A with its developers over at Game Developer! (For some reason it’s attributed to “staff,” but I assure you I wrote the questions for it.) It’s a strategy simulation game about laying out roads. (Released today!)
• Wayward Strand, from ghost pattern, a narrative adventure game set in 1970s Australia with a time management element.
• Cult of the Lamb, from Devolver Digital and Massive Monster, a cute procedurally-generated town-building game with action elements and dungeon exploration.
• Another Crab’s Treasure, from Aggro Crab, which actively calls itself a “Souls-like” in its trailer, an action combat game about a hermit crab out on a quest. Hermit crabs find shells and other objects to serve as their home in real life, and this game incorporates that fact into the gameplay. Not out until next year, though.

At the end, there were a few short clips of other upcoming games: One Shot: World Machine Edition, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees (releases today), Idol Manager, Card Shark, Cursed to Golf, A Guidebook of Babel, and OPUS: Echo of Starsong: Full Bloom Edition.

Last-minute addition, here are Kyle and Krista, formerly of the Nintendo Minute and now with their own thang going on, reacting to the games:

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Late submissions for juried independent game festival Indiecade are open until May 15th.

C.J. Wheeler for Rock Paper Shotgun: Perfect World Entertainment absorbed by Gearbox Publishing.

Mitchell Clark for The Verge tells us that Apple claims right to remove software from App Store if they aren’t downloaded recently.

Brian of Nintendo Everything reports that Aspyr is open to ports of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, including unreleased Wii versions. The source is this tweet.

“Dreadknux” of Sonic Stadium writes of fan art that adds the movies’ Agent Stone to images stills of other Sonic properties.

Brendan Hesse of Gamespot, speaking for site staff, offers a ranking of 14 Final Fantasy games. From worst to first, the ranking, all according to original Japanese numbering and not including the MMORPGs:
2 < 15 < 13 < 3 < 1 < 9 < 4 < 8 < 7 < 5 < 7 Remake < 10 < 12 Zodiac Age < 6

This is a little towards the technical end of things, but Sudden Desu on Twitter has created a framework for developing Mega CD (a.k.a. Sega CD) games, available from GitHub.

I’ve seen it elsewhere, but I’m linking to Eric Van Allen’s report for Destructoid, on Disney Dreamlight Valley, a lifesim with Disney IP. I’m imagining it as being like Animal Crossing, but with Disney characters. Do you know how annoying a neighbor Tigger would be?

Dennis Payne of Gaming On Linux tells us of a Dungeon Crawler Jam hosted by dungeoncrawlers.org, with some interesting output!

Ian Walker of Kotaku tells us of a mod for Final Fantasy VII Remake that brings Yoshitaka Amano-like designs to the generally un-Yoshitaka-Amano-like Barrett!

Alex Donaldson of VG247 snidely and suitably mocks the Denuvo DRM in the upcoming Sonic Origins for protecting the digital virtue of the original Sonic games, which have long been widely traded on the web.

Adam Conway at XDA lets us know of Skyway, a work-in-progress Nintendo Switch emulator made specifically for Android.

Christian Donlan, writing on Eurogamer, lets us know of Playdate games available on itch.io!

It fell to Sean Hollister at The Verge to inform us of a hack of a Fischer-Price toddler game controller to make it suitable for playing Elden Ring. Was it made by foone? It wasn’t, it was Rudeism? Cool.

And Steve Watts, writing for Gamespot, has, to mark the 35th anniversary of the release of the original Castlevania (the game not the anime), a listing of games not-too-subtly inspired by it, like 8 Eyes for the NES. Although this reviewer feels compelled to note they left out The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest!

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Sega looks to revive Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio properties

On using a serial port SD card reader on a Sega Dreamcast

How a Sonic fanfic writer ended up leading Sonic Frontiers

A roguelite that looks like an 80s Saturday Morning cartoon

Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games could be coming to Switch Online

Old Super Mario Bros. anime restored in hi-def quality and available to stream or download

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